Defeat Into Victory

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm John Amble. [00:00:11] Speaker B: And I'm Theo Lipsky. [00:00:13] Speaker A: And the MWI Book Club is where we talk about books and the profession of arms. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Each episode features one book, fiction or nonfiction, new or old bestseller or cult classic, and we give it a close read to find lessons about war, about leadership and about character. In this episode, Defeat Into Victory by William Slim. [00:00:36] Speaker A: Welcome back to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. This is episode two of the podcast. If you listen to episode one, welcome back. If not, the premise of the podcast is pretty simple. It's predicated on this idea that reading is a key part of the military profession and that an army that reads is an army that's better prepared to fight and to win. I'm John Ambo and I'm joined once again today by my co host, Theo Lipski. In each episode, we're going to talk about one book. So, Theo, why don't you tell listeners what book we have for today. [00:01:07] Speaker B: Today we are going to talk about Defeat Into Victory by Viscount William Slim. [00:01:12] Speaker A: What can you tell us about the Viscount William Slim? [00:01:15] Speaker B: The Viscount William Slim is one of the great officers of the 20th century. He's probably one of the more underrated officers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the more improbable of the great British officers. By that I mean he was born to a humble background. His father was an unsuccessful ironmonger in Bristol. Slim arrives as the second son at the very end of the 1890s because his family doesn't have a lot of money and Slim is the second son. He doesn't get a chance to go to university, but that doesn't stop him from securing a temporary commission in the summer of 1914 when World War I breaks out. And he subsequently proves himself to be quite the soldier. He fights fiercely and is injured at Gallipoli. He then is decorated for gallantry in Mesopotamia. And at the war's end, he chooses not to go back to civilian life and instead finds a way to get a permanent commission in the British military. During the interwar years, he rises through the ranks, building a reputation all the while for operational savvy and tactical savvy. And he ends up commanding a battalion of Gurkhas. He trains Gurkha officers. He serves elsewhere in the British professional military education system. He serves on their army headquarters in India and has built up enough of a record by the outbreak of World War II to end up commanding the 10th Indian Brigade in Abyssinia, what we now call Ethiopia, fighting the Italians, which he does successfully, getting injured, but not badly enough to stop the British military from placing, plucking him out of Abyssinia and the 10th Indian Brigade to go serve in Burma, which is, of course, the subject of the memoir that we read for this episode that we'll discuss now. [00:02:59] Speaker A: So why did you pick this book? I mean, you just, you know, you just sang the praises of Slim, and I think that that's. There's a consensus surrounding, you know, how effective he was as a commander and how, you know, how great a book this book is Defeat Into Victory is. But why did you pick it for episode two? [00:03:15] Speaker B: I've parsed these reasons in my head into three. The first is that it's an extraordinary book about military operations. It can be treated as a textbook in modern military operations because the Burma Campaign, that is, the attempt to defend Burma from a Japanese invasion starting in 1942, and then retake it from particularly 1944 to 1945, involved basically every form of military operations and every challenge that can compromise military operations. It was a joint fight. It was a multinational fight. It was a fight that saw every domain involved. The sea, the air, the land. The variance of terrain on the land domain was extraordinary. They fought in deserts. The fighting occurred in jungle. The fighting occurred in mountains. There was mechanized, motorized, also on foot. Plans change. There were multinational partners with the virgin incentives. Just every single variable you can come up with, perhaps with the exception of space operations, asserted itself at some point throughout the campaign. And Slim talks through each variable at some point in depth in a very accessible but very sophisticated way throughout the book. So that's the first reason. It's a lesson in the operational art. The second reason is perhaps the reason for which it's most famous, which is independent of the operational art. It's also just an extraordinary primer for leadership. Slim demonstrates in myriad ways over the course of the book how to reckon with all those operational challenges and still lead men in war. And he narrates his approach to leadership through defeat and then, of course, victory in such a way that you can apply what he does to your own leadership challenges, be they in an army formation or in the workplace. And for that, a lot of people who might not have any particular interest either in the operational art or in the Burma Campaign or even World War II, have sung the praises of the book and of Slim more generally. Then the third reason for which I think this book ought be read, or certainly the third reason for which I picked it up, is that this particular fight is important, the Burma campaign, irrespective of questions of the operational art, irrespective of questions of Slim's leadership matters. If you want to understand the course of human events in the 20th century, and in order to spell that out, perhaps it's worth talking about what exactly the Burma campaign was, what Burma is, and why, where the great powers lay at the start of this book. [00:06:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there are a couple notes that we have to start with. Right. The first is, as you said, this is an incredibly descriptive narrative of offensive campaigning in Burma. That means that particularly in. In segments of the book, when he's really describing military action, it is a dizzying array of named divisions, sometimes brigades, corps, armies, army groups, theater level commands. It is very challenging to follow without an order of battle chart next to you while you're reading it. It would be all but impossible to follow for listeners, as if we tried to sort of describe all of those units and name them by name. So we're going to avoid, for the most part, outside of Slim's specific commands, really naming those subordinate and higher echelon forces, because I think that that'll just facilitate the discussion better. The second thing is, you know, I read this book with a map open, with Google Maps open and also a browser so that I could look up some of the names, because he uses place names that were sort of colonial era, what the Brits called these places, which are not necessarily the names, but as they are now that the Burmese or the people of Myanmar now, for instance, refer to these places. So I would look up the name that he used, then I would find what it's called today. I'd look it up on a map. And that was really. I needed that to kind of orient myself in spatially as I was following along with this narrative. We can't really give that opportunity to listeners, but I do think we can, at a minimum, sort of position it on a. Yeah, right. So when we talk about Burma, I mentioned to you before we were talking, that I was trying to think of sort of an analogy what to describe its shape. And I said it's sort of like a misshapen tennis racket. And you had suggested maybe a tomahawk or an axe, which got to me, got me to where what I think is the best sort of shape to use to describe it is like a tomahawk steak or a bone in ribeye. Right. Starting from the south, you've got this long, narrow bone, this long coastal strip between the Bay of Bengal and Thailand to the east, and the rest of the Indochinese Peninsula to the east. And then as you get to the north, it sort of opens up and you've got this, the steak part of this, of this bone in ribeye steak. To its northeast is China. To its west, northwest is India. And, and, and I think it's important to note this is pre partition, obviously before the 1971 independence of Bangladesh. And so India at the time comprised not only India, but also Pakistan and Bangladesh. And then to the east, you've got, as I said, the Indochinese Peninsula. It borders Thailand. And to the west, the Bay of the Bay of Bengal. It is a sort of on the, in the southern part of Southeast Asia. So you've got everything in the Pacific theater is happening to its east, but also to the west, on the other side of India, you've got the Middle east theater, which is also an important theater during this. And then beyond there, of course. Of course, Europe. [00:09:36] Speaker B: Right. There are at least three ways you could think of why Burma matters. And one is that Burma is the western gateway into China. China at this time is contested ground. The Japanese have invaded China in the early 30s, and there's a Nationalist army led by Chiang Kai Shek that is trying to defeat the Japanese that invaded China. With the support of the Allies, the Japanese have succeeded in blockading the entire Chinese coast in the east, which means that if you want to get material to the Nationalists, you have to do so through the backdoor, so to speak. And that back door is accessed via Burma. A second reason it matters a lot is it's the way the expanding Japanese Empire can access India by land. India at this time is a British Imperial holding. So if the Allies want to defend this extremely important part of their empire, which provides them great material support and strategic position to support a whole bunch of theaters, they need to hold Burma, or at least hold the border between India and Burma. And it's quite hard to do so if you don't control Burma proper. And then the third reason is that Burma is key terrain if you want to access all of the resources that lie to the south and to the east of Burma that the materially strapped Japanese in particular need. Those are not just the oil fields in Burma, but also the oil fields in what is then called the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, as well as if you want to control the port of Singapore, which is an extremely important node that supports the sea, lines of communication that stitch together Japanese holdings in the Pacific. [00:11:25] Speaker A: So you've given us sort of a pretty good, like, broad overview of what the book is about. But I think it would be useful at this point before we, you know, with each of these episodes, our intent is to break the book into three parts and break our discussion into three parts. We're going to do that before we start with part one. I wonder if you can give us the sort of executive summary of the book. [00:11:45] Speaker B: Sure. An executive summary of the book might sound something like this. At the start of 1942, the Japanese invade Burma, which is then being held by the British Empire. They quickly achieve a great deal of military success against the British. The British are ill prepared and their hold on southern Burma rapidly deteriorates. By March 1942, a general officer named William Slim is brought in to command Burma Corps. And over the succeeding two months, William Slim oversees a organized but inglorious retreat of the British military from southern Burma into northern Burma towards the India border. By May of 1942, the Japanese have succeeded in pushing Slim and the British forces in Burma over the border into India and the Japanese gained complete control of Burma. William Slim then spends nearly two years reconstituting his combat power in India just over the border from Burma. And he succeeds in 1944 in defending India from a Japanese invasion at these legendary battles of Imphal and Kohima. He then by the end of 1944, leads British military forces back into Burma and oversees the reconquest of Burma by May of 1945. That is the lean campaign oriented executive summary of the book. But of course, what that leaves out are the extraordinary lessons that William Slim teaches us along the way in leadership, in operations and in humility, frankly. [00:13:33] Speaker A: So we've decided to split this book into three parts and we've done so. Slim splits his into six books. His book consists of six books, he calls them. We chose book one to be part one. This is the defeat. Books two and three to be part two. This is the transition period and in books four, five and six, the victory portion of the book. So we start with book one. What happens? [00:14:00] Speaker B: The book opens with an important vignette both for military history generally and for of course, this particular narrative. And that is the battle of the the Satang Bridge. The month is February. It's late February 1942. And the Japanese have surprised the British by invading over a different pass into Burma than the British expected, in part because the British had so little intelligence available to them in what we now call Thailand to anticipate Japanese troop movements. Either way, the primary fighting force of the British and southeastern Burma. At the time, the 17th division is thrown back to a important river ahead of Rangoon called the Sittang river. And the 17th Division is under such pressure that it ends up getting split across the Satang River. There's an element left on the east side of the river to delay the Japanese, and the rest of the division funnels west over the Satang river bridge. But before the 17th Division commander can pull his troops on the far side of the bridge back over it, he realizes that he has to make a decision. Either to attempt to do so and risk leaving the rail bridge standing so that the Japanese can cross the Satang river and give chase, or blow the bridge in the early morning hours of 23rd February, so that the bridge Japanese are a little bit delayed as they hurdle towards Rangoon, but the cost of doing so will be abandoning some of his soldiers on the far side of the bridge. And he elects to blow the bridge. The 17th Divisional Commander does so, abandons a decent part of his formation. Unfortunately, that doesn't prevent the taking of Rangoon by the Japanese, thereby giving them complete control of southern Burma and denying the British an important port of resupply. And very quickly, it looks as though the British will be routed from one of their old colonial holdings, Burma. It's at this stage that Slim shows up. [00:16:12] Speaker A: Yep, he was. He was plucked out of, I believe, division command in the Middle east, in Iraq and Syria, and brought in. You know, this is a. This is an honor, although not an uncommon one in a. In a world war of this size, a division commander is, you know, handpicked, selected to command a branch, new core. And on its surface, maybe that sounds like a good thing, but, you know, scratch a little bit deeper. And this is a rough situation because he gets there after the. The battle for the Satang Bridge, after the bridge is blown, and he comes into a country with British forces in. I mean, I don't know that it's overstating it to say in. In disarray. [00:16:48] Speaker B: So Slim shows up and immediately begins assessing the state of play on the ground following the fall of Rangoon to the Japanese. And he finds, following a lot of battlefield circulation and conversations with soldiers and subordinate commanders and staff, that there were basically six issues facing the British that were causing things to go so poorly. One was their intelligence was, quote, extremely bad. They had very little in the way of intelligence forward. Their lack of air power prevented much in the way of aerial intelligence, and they didn't have a lot of Japanese speakers in their formation. Two, he says, we were ill trained and ill equipped for jungle warfare. This mattered a great deal because at the time, Burma lacked much in the way of roads. And as a result, the motorized British formations and the mechanized British formations were bound to very predictable avenues of approach. The Japanese were not bound to the roads and so were able to flank British formations, go to their rear, establish roadblocks behind the British as the British attempted to retreat, bottle the British up and destroy their combat power. He also found that the combat units were far below their authorized strength, either in personnel or equipment, which meant that he had far fewer soldiers, even accounting for combat losses, than on paper you would expect him to. He found the local inhabitants were not quote unquote helpful. It's worth noting here that Burma had a large and has a large Burmese or Burman population in Slim's language, and they had interests of their own, and they had a great deal of agency. And their interests were not aligned with the British Empire reliably, in part because they resented the Indian population in Burma that the British backed, that enjoyed a disproportionate amount of influence in their society. And the Japanese, of course, carefully cultivated the Burmese population so as to make life more difficult for the British imperial presence. Slim is a very sensitive student of local affairs and local stakeholder interests, as the book reveals, but he acknowledges up front that the British did not have the support they needed of the local population in order to win what was going to be a very difficult fight over a large country with severe supply problems. He also saw that the array of British forces was not ideal, to put it politely. The British had huge gaps between their formations in Burma, which meant that they were at risk of being routed. And lastly, morale was incredibly low because of the humiliation at the Satang river, because of the fall of Rangoon, and because of the rapidity with which the Japanese had inflicted a series of defeats. And all of these problems meant that it was unlikely that Slim was going to be able to retain Burma, though he did hold out hope. He couldn't fix all of them in the time that he had to retreat. He couldn't fix the sentiments of the local population. He couldn't fix the intelligence problem. He couldn't fix also the jungle training problem that the British suffered from. What he could fix was, as he saw at least the disposition of the British as they conducted their retrograde and also the morale problem. And first he fixes the disposition problem by concentrating the dispersed military formations of the British the best he can, such that they can manage better delaying actions as they move from south to north towards the Indian border through March and April of 1942. And all the while he discusses the relations he has with the various British commanders with great humility and empathy and attention. [00:20:52] Speaker A: And this is, I think, an important point that comes out throughout the book. Slim comes off as a genuinely good human being, right? He has. He's complimentary toward, it seems like almost everybody, even when he disagrees with somebody and he says, I think this person's decision was the wrong one. He. It almost seems like he goes out of his way to say, to be understanding, as you said, empathetic to, to describe the challenging circumstances within which they had to make that decision or to point out some of this individual's, you know, strengths or virtues. Alongside this sort of soft criticism, I think that sets it apart, sets the book apart. That tone from a lot of post war memoirs which tend to have a tone of justifying decisions that were made that might have had some, some negative consequences, right. [00:21:40] Speaker B: The one other thing that's worth flagging during this entire retreat is that early on, even with all those material problems and the operational challenges and the tactical disadvantages, Slim still places a emphasis on morale. You know, you might expect him to go on and on about aircraft or on and on about resupply lines, are on and on about wireless sets, but instead the thing that he wants to talk about is morale. That's the first thing that he says he tries to fix. And he does so by trying to be present on my page 46. Amidst the retreat towards this city then called Prome, which becomes quite important as the British get organized north of Rangoon, Slim pauses to say the most important thing about a commander. He doesn't say his operational know how. He doesn't say his ability to drive the operations process. He doesn't say his ability to marshal joint resources to converge combat power on the decisive point, though no doubt he would say all those things are important. He says the most important thing about a commander is his effect on morale. I was known to a number of the more senior officers, especially those of the Indian army, from the rank of battalion commanders upwards, belittled to the troops as far as morale was concerned. I was. I therefore started pretty well from scratch, which is not a bad thing to do. And then he talks about how he circulated among the troops as often as possible, as early as possible. [00:23:09] Speaker A: And that's a. I mean, look, we're going to get into this in, in part two and I suspect also in part three about just the, the degree of emphasis that he places on morale alongside the other factors that contribute to either success or failure on the battlefield of note during this retreat, it's essentially, you know, a series of incremental retrogrades, right? Trying to find a more defensible line. And it's important to, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, we can read this book. We can look back at. At this period in. In the first half of 1942 in Burma, and we can say, look, Slim was dropped in there for the purpose of managing a retreat north and then northwest back into India. But at the time, he doesn't see it that way. He says on. And you know, in this. In this first part, you know, as they've already retreated, I believe, to three successive lines and they're getting further and further to the north. He says, I still thought there was a chance that even now we might turn their tables on the Japanese and thus avoid abandoning burma. It's not 20 pages before they. Before that becomes clearly, you know, a pipe dream that was never going to be possible. But he still has that. And I think when he's circulating the battlefield and he's meeting as many of his troops as he can, if that's his level of optimism, if that's his spirit, you can see how it would have a positive impact on morale that is being just bludgeoned by this series of tactical defeat after tactical defeat, right? [00:24:39] Speaker B: When we say that on a podcast, it sounds sort of sanitized and simple and brave. But one of the things that makes this memoir such an enduring artifact in military education and thought is that it's not sanitized. The way Slim tells it, there's this very vivid moment while the English, or correction, the British, are trying to hold the oil fields, which are of some strategic import for all parties involved. Slim recounts a subordinate commander basically fighting to his last round and then getting on the radio desperately asking Slim for permission to retreat. Slim assesses that the subordinate commander needs to hold on. And that moment is quite brutal and quite affecting. But Slim does this time and time again because he does, as you say, believe that the British can hold on to Burma. And even if he has some doubts about it, he knows he needs to make it as costly of a victory as possible for the Japanese, and he needs to buy his own formation as much time to retreat in an orderly fashion. There are a couple other things that come up early on in the book. One of those is the multinational nature of the fight. So, for one, because the British military is an imperial military, you've got all sorts of nationalities in the formations. When we talk about British soldiers, we are in this episode at least including what he calls Burman soldiers, people from Myanmar, as we'd call it today, also Indian soldiers. He's also fighting alongside allies in the Americans, particularly this famous general. Our listeners may know Vinegar Joe Stilwell and the Chinese troops that Stilwell commands. And there are early on stories that he tells of the frustrations of fighting alongside multinational partners with their own chains of command, their own incentives that don't perfectly align with what he sees as the urgent task of that ought be done during the retreat. This occurs over and over and over again and reaches all the way to Stilwell's level. Stillwell himself not being always the easiest partner for Slim. [00:26:47] Speaker A: And some of the challenges, you know, associated with coalition warfare are very practical. Not enough people who speak the same language as the two Chinese divisions that at this stage of the, of the story are involved in the fight or that they're way essentially waiting for them to arrive into Burma from, from China. The, the language barrier is a real concern that he highlights. There's also a time, a period where he, you know, he makes it. He describes, for me, it was on page 64. He describes three observations about Chinese soldiers. They're not derogatory, you know, objectively derogatory, but they are a little bit simplistic. They are a little bit stereotypes. And there's a temptation to view that through the lens of the time. This is a colonial era. This is an era in which it was not uncommon for senior British military leaders to, to hold these stereotypes about the, the, the fighting forces from the far flung corners of the British Empire. I would caution against that reading of reading it through that lens. You know, years ago I was helping out with my unit, was clearing out some storage space and I came across a box of the hand of handbooks that were issued to US forces in 2003 during, ahead of the invasion of Iraq. And reading through it, I found a lot of the same overly simplistic stereotypes that Slim seems to hold about some of the Indian forces under his command or the Chinese forces involved in this coalition in the Burma theater, where it's easy to just say, well, that was a different time. You know, Slim and his contemporaries were racist or, you know, chauvinistic or ethnocentric. But in reality, I think it just, it highlights one of the enduring challenges of coalition warfare. And that's if you're going to fight well with a partner nation, with the forces of a partner nation, you really have to Try to understand that partner nation in a nuanced and respectful way. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it will make you a better fighting force. [00:29:02] Speaker B: Right? He is generous with praise for these multinational partners too. So shortly after relating this rather harrowing moment wherein he has a subordinate commander who's desperately calling for relief, and he goes to the Chinese partners to order them to counter attack, the Japanese source to provide that relief. And he meets with this delay that is inexplicable. Rather than just blow his lid, so to speak, and spend the next several pages decrying his Japanese partners, he explains what was going on, what shadow chain of command, so to speak, was operating, that he couldn't observe himself, but was explaining his multinational partner's behavior. And then they do counterattack. That is to say, the Chinese partners do commit to the counterattack. And he says, when they did counter attack, they fought splendidly. That's the language he uses. They took their objective. They acquitted themselves well. They inflicted heavy losses. And he says, this was vouched for by our own officers. He also. Throughout the retelling of the retreat, which is marked by chapters with pretty straightforward names like Disaster, he maintains a sense of humor. And, of course, it's easy to imagine that writing in 1957 as he is humor comes easier than it did at the time. But you just come to believe that he probably did maintain humor at the time as well. There's this great moment wherein everything has gone wrong during some episode within the retreat, and his commanders and his staff are depressed. He steps out of his sort of command hooch, and he's met with the glum look of his officers. And he says to them, because he knows that he's supposed to present a brave face and morale matters so much. But he doesn't know what to say. He says lamely, oh, well, gentlemen, you know, it could be worse. [00:30:52] Speaker A: Yes. And somebody asks him how, sir? [00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah, he says in response to the officer, who says, how could it be worse? He says, I could cheerfully have murdered him. But instead I had to keep my temper. He said, oh, it might be raining. And then, of course, shortly the skies open up, and it just starts dumping on the command and control site. These sorts of asides bring great humanity to what is otherwise a pretty tough story to read. [00:31:18] Speaker A: So when we originally discussed how we wanted to break this book up into. Into three parts, you know, we tossed around a couple of ideas. And I think the one we landed on was. Was perfect. Because, look, the title of the book is Defeat Into Victory. Part one was about the defeat. Part three that we're going to get to is about the victory. This part two is very much that into part. It's a, you know, it's a transition period of going from defeat to victory, going from failure to success. And he does a very Slim does a very good job of describing the constituent parts of that transition. What, what, what they were deficient in during the defeat and what they would have to be proficient in during, during in order to achieve victory. Now this part two itself is really I think best understood broken down into two parts. May of 1942, they cross back into India. At the time they're concerned that Japanese forces will follow them into India and take the fight into India. This is a real concern, concern of theirs. However, there is the monsoons to contend with which is, you know, in part one, Slim had described his, the three biggest fears that he had. One of them was that the Japanese would get behind them. As you described it, the, the Japanese were much more proficient in jungle warfare and so they were routinely getting behind the, the sort of road bound British forces. The second one was that food supplies would run out. This was again, this was a, a huge concern that he had and one that he knew he would have to rectify if they were going to recapture Burma, retake Burma. And the third was that the monsoons would make movement effectively impossible. It did not for them before they were able to escape to India. It did effectively keep the Japanese from pressing the attack further. And so you ended up with this period of sort of almost stalemate with the Japanese largely holding Burma and the, the British forces and their allies back in India. So the first section of this second part is really about consolidation and reorganization. You kind of alluded to that at the end of part one. The second section of part two is when they return to the offensive. This is not the large scale attack to reseize Burma, but is the beginning of taking offensive action for a number of reasons including to restore morale against the Japanese within Burma and also along the frontier between India and Burma. The transition of that gap that we mentioned from defeat into victory, from failure to success, to me I think is predicated on, on improvements in six key areas. Those are training, leadership, intelligence, logistics, morale and air power. I don't know if you, if, if, if that corresponds with your reading of it or if you have any other areas that you would add. [00:34:09] Speaker B: I think that's right. And he breaks down in almost taxonomical fashion what he thinks goes into morale. Those could be made subcomponents But I think that that's a good list. [00:34:22] Speaker A: It is and actually I think that that makes the book a little bit more digestible because it is 550 pages long. It does cover what a little over three years of an entire theater, an entire, well, an entire country anyway, sub theater, so to speak. But he does make it easier to follow because he does seem to love a numbered list. You know, in, in good military tradition, you can tell he's not a, a stranger to 5 paragraph op orders or whatever the British equivalent to that at the time was. And that does really help you sort of as he kind of crystallizes his thinking about issues on everything from what are our three key tasks to what are the constituent components of morale in, in a fighting force. So those again, training, leadership, intelligence, logistics, morale and air power. The first part of this, of, of this second part of the book is as I mentioned, reorganization, consolidation. And you already start to see improvements in areas of, of deficiency. So one of the areas that is clearly his priority during this period is training. His concern is that, and he alluded to this, although in a quite respectful way, so as not to denigrate his subordinates or his predecessors. But he highlights the deficiencies and the lack of sort of uniform infantry training, the lack of familiarity and comfort and confidence operating in very challenging jungle terrain. So one of the first things that he does in, in this is 1942, after May of 1942, when they're reconsolidating in India, is he issues a memo, an eight point memo. And he says the training was based on a short memorandum I had drawn up giving what I considered to have been the tactical lessons of the 1942 campaign. Then he lists out the. In sort of a short paragraph for each of eight points. This is to guide all of the training for all of the units under his command. He then goes on to be quite profusive in crediting those people under his command who do a good job of implementing this training. He says Stillwell was magnificent, particularly with the Chinese divisions that are, that are under his leadership, that are fighting underneath him. I don't say under his command because as we'll see, some of the command relationships are, are a little bit wacky throughout this. But there are Chinese forces who effectively refuse to fight under anybody other than Joe Stillwell. And Slim is, is very complimentary of what Silva achieves in bringing their training up to standard. He mentioned specifically a. An American colonel who was charged with designing the training plan based on this eight point memo and getting the Chinese to these Chinese forces to a point where they would be ready to train well, trained enough to be able to contribute as and when the, the, this, the Allies retake the offensive. It's not only unit level training that he focuses on though, and I find this very interesting. He actually gives us a window into not only how he sees his leadership philosophy with the combat forces underneath him, but also how he treats his staff, how what he considers his headquarters to be, he considers it to be a war fighting headquarters. So he has his staff officers and the typists and everybody that are sort of on his staff. He has them practicing the, effectively the equivalent of what we would now call jumping talk, right? They break down their entire core headquarters. They get to a point where they can do so in a couple of hours, which if you imagine a core headquarters, that is an incredible achievement. And then he says, and we can reconstitute that core headquarters in another place in a similar amount of time. Imagine the advantage that that will give him going forward if, if his corps, and then later when he gets promoted to army commander, the corps underneath him are capable of maneu with the combat forces in what is a very mobile fight for much of this, for much of this campaign. [00:38:21] Speaker B: In that training memo, he flags an important lesson from the defeat, which is that there are no non combatants in jungle warfare. One of the consequences of that observation is that you have to train everybody, even the thousands and thousands of support personnel to fight. And that pays dividends in the subsequent reconquest of Burma, as we'll see. [00:38:51] Speaker A: So training becomes one of his first priorities. Another one of his priorities, although he's, you have to read between the lines a little bit more here is leadership. Look, Slim is a, is generous of character. He, as we mentioned before, does not criticize his superiors, he does not criticize his subordinates, he does not criticize his peers. When he does, he does so very precisely and almost goes out of his way to caveat it, to caveat any of that criticism. So you don't. There's no point during the, during the retreat, there's no point after that where he says our leadership was deficient. In fact, he had been complimentary of the, of the commanders that were serving underneath him. But once he gets back into India, you really see him starting to emphasize the importance of the leadership of the units underneath him. So for instance, when the fifth Indian Division arrives from the Middle east, it had been fighting for years in the Middle east, the fifth Indian Division arrives. And first of all, I think it's important to note that it seems like every general officer in this theater is somebody that he either taught at the, at the Command and Staff College in the 1930s when he taught there or had worked with him or underneath him in some unit at the battalion level or or elsewhere. So when this division arrives, its commander is named Major General Briggs. And he says it had a spirit and self reliance that came only from real fighting. But then he goes on to say, like all good divisions and bad ones, it reflected its commander's personality. You can tell he really believes this. You can tell that this, this to him is the essence of leadership, is to form, to form units in your. That are styled after your philosophy of war fighting effectively. And he really wants subordinate units underneath him that are led by people that have a similar view. So he's very complimentary of, of his subordinate units, the ones that he thinks are going to be instrumental in achieving victory. He's also quite complimentary of those that are sort of in, on his level and above him. So for instance, he falls under as a. I believe by this time he's been promoted from. He had been the Burma Corps commander. The Burma Corps was disbanded as soon as they got back into India. It existed for all of 61 days and in retrospect existed solely for the purpose of managing a retreat out of Burma and back into India. He's given command of 15th Corps not long after he gets promoted to the command of 14th Army. So by this time he's 14, he's in command of 14th Army. He's got multiple corps underneath him. His, his superior, his commanding officer. Above him is a commanding general of the army group. I believe his name is Gifford. I don't know if it's pronounced Gifford or Gifford. It's an A instead of an O. But forgive me, I think it's Gifford. Yeah. Forgive me if any of his descendants are listening. And I've just, I've just butchered his name. Here's what he says about General Gifford at one point. As a speech maker, he was neither eloquent nor picturesque, but he had two things that impressed soldiers. He knew his stuff and he was dead honest. The. And he puts that in italics. The quality that showed through him was integrity. And that was the quality which as much as any other we wanted in our army commander. You almost get a sense in reading what he says about other general officers, you get a window into what he aspires to be as a leader. I don't know if you had any thoughts on that, Theo. [00:42:22] Speaker B: Oh, I do. He's clearly deliberate about being generous with praise and refraining from critiquing officers and soldiers and formations. A window into his philosophy. To that end, you get during that limited offensive maneuver that the British undertake after they've retreated what in the book and in history is called the first Arakan campaign. Basically, a senior commander to Slim has the idea that the thing to do is to immediately go back on the offensive. When Slim himself doesn't think the British troops are yet in a position to do so, he's overruled. And so he oversees this limited offensive back into Burma that, as he anticipated, does not go well while circulating throughout the battlefield during that first Archon campaign, he gets very frustrated. On my page 161 and this is by now April 1943, he makes observations that end and then he says it was no use crying over spilled milk. In war you have to pay for your mistakes. And in Arakhan, the same mistakes have been made again and again until the troops lost heart. I got very angry with one or two units that had not behaved well and said some hard things to them. But thinking it over, I was not sure the blame was all theirs. In any case, what was wanted now was not recriminations, post mortems and witch hunts, but some clear and quick thinking. He's talking there about a specific operational action, but that quote could be used to describe his philosophy when writing the book too. Sure, in 1957 you don't need quick thinking anymore about the Burma campaign, but you do need clear thinking if you are to replicate the sort of victory that Slim eventually achieves. And what he's saying, I think could be read as a comment to his fellow memoirs. Hey, witch hunts, post mortems, finger pointing are not interesting when studying war. What's interesting is clear thinking. So I'm not going to ventilate about the various imperfections of my peers or my subordinates or the situation which I was handed. I'm going to orient on the lessons that are instructive. And yeah, I think that generosity shows in the way he talks about the commanders he admires, certainly like Gifford Cowan Stillwell, in part. There's a special operations leader on the British side named Ord Wingate who leads a very fascinating special operations formation throughout the Burma campaign and is eventually killed. You can tell that Slim does not think highly of Ord Wingate or at least takes issue with Ord Wingate's conduct. The way in which he talks about Wingate and their relationship could be its own conduct podcast episode. I don't Want to get too far into it here. Suffice to say that if you read his treatment of Wingate, you will see somebody trying to make what might otherwise be a story of personal animus as useful as possible to the historical record and to students of war, as you mentioned. [00:45:22] Speaker A: I'm glad you mentioned both the first Archon campaign and Ord Wingate because the rest of part two, most of 1942, after May 1942, has been this reorganization, reconstitution, preparing to begin to go back on the offensive. Then they do that and there are four important phases of that here that he writes about. The first is the first Arakan campaign. Arakan is modern day Rakhine State, which you may have read about if you, you know, pay attention to the news about, about Burma, now Myanmar. But it's a coastal region and there's a small peninsula on it. I say small. Burma is actually much larger than most people. I think, think that the, the distance is here. The retreat was I think 900 miles that they had to, that they had to cover to get back to the Indian frontier. But this Archon peninsula becomes, for a variety of reasons, some of which aren't always that clear, becomes sort of a fixation this peninsula along the coast area. So they launched the first Archon campaign. This is initially successful but ultimately turned back before it gets to the end of the, of the peninsula and British forces are withdrawn. The second is this deep operation by Wingate's effectively body of special operations forces that is trying to go deep, get behind enemy lines and do all sorts of things. You mentioned that, that Slim maybe is not overly fond of Wingate. He's also not, not sold on whether those special operations forces, such as they were, are really the right approach and that they wouldn't have been better put into conventional formations to augment the conventional firepower that they combat power that they had at the Allies disposal. [00:47:05] Speaker B: Well, he certainly thinks that Wingate incorrectly cross applies lessons from his combat experience against the Italians to his planned operations against the Japanese. Slim's critique is in part, hey, you think that special operations rear actions against the Japanese are going to spook them into retreat or disarray like they did the Italians. But I've also fought the Italians. Mind you, Slim had fought against the Italians in Ethiopia and I've now fought the Japanese. And you are wrong. [00:47:40] Speaker A: And what we saw in East Africa with those sorts of operations are sort of like the long range, long range desert Group, I believe it was called the, the, the British Special operations forces that operated in the Sahara, it's one thing to be sort of self sustaining, small special operations teams in the open desert like North Africa, like East Africa, it's an entirely different thing to do so in the jungles of, of Southeast Asia. So not only are the Japanese a very different adversary than the Italians, the terrain is also very different and doesn't necessarily lend itself to that. And we see that because Wingate's deep operation does ultimately end without really achieving anything. So we've got the first Arakan campaign on the Arakan Peninsula, Wingate's deep operation, the second Arakan campaign. And then towards the end, he turns his attention to the northern front, right along the Indian frontier with Burma. This is where Stillwell is active, where the Chinese forces underneath him are active, where there's an effort to essentially create a land bridge with China to bring more Chinese forces into the fight. What did we learn from each of. From these sort of four campaigns? We learned a lot of things. We learned what Slim's priorities were, and we learned how he went about making improvements in those areas of priorities. We talked about training in the reconstitution reorganization phase. We talked about leadership during that phase. He now turns to logistics. The logistics challenges in a theater like this are almost impossible to fathom. They're short of everything. He actually goes through and describes how short they are of various types of ammunition, of various types of vehicles, all sorts of different equipment. And he understands, he recognizes throughout the book, that their theater is not the top of the priority list for things like supply, things like more manpower. He acknowledges that defeating Germany in Europe is the priority. He refers to his theater as the Cinderella theater, meaning the stepsisters in the. In Europe, the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the Pacific are going to have priority and get the nice new shiny things before he's going to. So he's got these challenges. There's also the challenge of bad infrastructure because not only do you have to have the stuff, the war fighting material, you have to be able to move it. And he talks about the. The, for instance, the rail lines that are insufficient to moving anywhere near the quantity of equipment that they need to move it. He gives specific numbers. He talks about a rail line near the frontier in Assam in northeastern India that is capable of moving 600 tons a day, nowhere near what they're able to do, the Americans. And he credits them immensely for this. Send railway engineers to come and improve that rail line. Within. I believe it's. Within weeks, it's risen from 600 tons a day to 2008. Hundred tons a day later in the war would ultimately get to 4,400 tons. And then I think by the end of the war, there are 7,300 tons, something like a 12 fold increase. That's crucial because most of what they move, they move by rail. However, he also highlights the terrible roadways that they have in some very difficult terrain. Look, at the end of the day, you can't move everything on the backs of individuals hacking their way through the jungle. You need to have some roads, particularly to get from one rail line to another. And he highlights one rail line in northeastern India, or, sorry, one roadway in northeastern India that they need to build. And how they do that to be able to put themselves in a better logistical position is remarkable. They don't have the materials to be able to build a road that they would normally build if they were in Europe, a metallized paved road. And so they essentially build bricks because they've got the clay and they, they establish kilns every, I believe it was every 20 miles. And they build an entire road for, I don't remember how long it was. I want to say something like 600 miles made entirely of brick. So the efforts that he, he leads his command toward improving their logistical position are immense because he recognizes how important. Again, during the defeat, he says supply is one of the three major concerns that he had during the retreat. [00:51:53] Speaker B: Right. The unofficial motto of his formation, he declares, is God helps those who help themselves. And you see that across every category or class of supply. They spend a great deal of time not just laying their own roads, but also making their own boats for the various littoral operations and river operations. [00:52:13] Speaker A: They built a navy. [00:52:14] Speaker B: Yeah, they basically build a navy from scratch. At this point, I should say we're Talking about the 14th army, right. Which is the formation that he eventually leads to reconquer Burma. They also invent their own parachutes because what they can't get over road and over rail, they air drop in. And they do so with material that had never been used for parachutes before, jute, which is produced in Bengal. And that requires experimentation. There are just so many junctures wherein another commander, a lesser commander, might say, I don't have what is needed to win here. You've decided Europe or the Germans are the priority. I'm going to do what I can to hold the India Burma border, but I don't know how you could expect anything more. And I don't know what else I could tell my troops. Obviously Slim is not that guy. And history is different for him being a different and better sort of commanding [00:53:13] Speaker A: officer, the parachutes are. They call them parachutes, right? These parachutes that they make out of jute. Jute. For anybody who isn't familiar, I wasn't, full disclosure, I had to read a little bit about it. But it's basically this fiber that can be woven into loosely woven fabric, lightweight fabric. And so they thought, why don't we make parachutes out of this? Because it is loosely woven, air can pass through it. And so they, they realized they had to eliminate the, the vent at the top of the parachute that would have been on a silk parachute. And the air passing through it kept it falling at a rate where, where the supplies could land and, and things weren't terribly damaged. The last three things, and just a couple of these I think we can cover very briefly that I think were important toward transitioning to a place where they could achieve victory. One was intelligence. He talks about intelligence throughout. And I think it's important to note that when he talks about intelligence, he means human. Human intelligence, he means scouts, he means local sources that are built into some form of network to be able to report on what they see. The second is air power. Air power. If you, you know, if you read the first book, the defeat, the retreat portion, they have, they have no air power. They have nothing to be able to combat. The, The Japanese have complete air supremacy with ground attack aircraft, with bombers. And by this stage, by the time that they're ready to go back on the offensive, the air power has started to arrive, some of it British, much of it American. And that really turns the tide. It becomes the thing that enables, I think probably more than anything else, it enables victory on the ground. Having a suitable degree of air power support and air transport support, because that becomes very important for the logistics reasons we talked about as well. And then the final thing we've touched on it, it's the, I think it's the theme of this book, or at least one of the main themes of this book is morale. You, you, you alluded to this earlier, but in this section of the book, he identifies low morale is one of his, one of the things that he wants to address most. And then he breaks morale into its constituent parts. He describes the challenges of morale. He describes the, the low levels of morale within his. Within his command. And then he describes three constituent parts of morale. Spiritual, intellectual, and material. Each of those three have three subordinate elements to it and spend 16 pages. That's 3% of this book. 3% of this book. He spends 16 pages discussing how he addressed each of those three sort of sub points of three elements of. Of morale. It could actually stand on its own as sort of a philosophy of morale in a war fighting command. It's worth reading, it's worth extracting. Even if you don't read this entire book, it's worth finding that. That 16 pages and reading it, because it does. You know, we all, we all acknowledge morale matters, but I don't think, I don't know if I've ever met anybody who thinks it matters as much as William Slim did. And he sort of convinces you that he's right, that that is as important as many of the other factors that are going that. That go into building combat power. [00:56:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And a aspect of his discussion of morale that stuck out to me was the ordering of the components of morale. So it's not just that morale has a spiritual and an intellectual and a material component, but that the most important of those three components is the spiritual component, not the material component. And after the spiritual component comes the intellectual component. What he's saying is that more important than a good cot or good food or even good clothing for a soldier's morale is having some great and noble object for the fight and an understanding that the achievement of that object is vital and understanding that the means by which the soldiers are going to achieve that object will be aggressive and active. Put another way, what he's saying is almost that for soldiers purposes, you inverse Maslow's hierarchy that they need more than a good tent. An understanding that they are fighting for a great cause and they're going to get after it aggressively. It would be one thing if the person writing this section were a known jerk or a known failure, right? Then it would be easy to dismiss this ordering because you could say, oh well, that guy was much hated, so he's not exactly credible on what soldiers really care about. Or that guy was loved, but he was ineffective. So maybe he didn't understand morale's effect on combat power or combat effectiveness anyhow. But this is William Slim that's writing. Probably the most loved commander of World War II, at least among the Brits, and one of the most effective, who was handed the most dire of material and operational situations and fashioned it into a victory. So he commands our attention. There's just an extraordinary section that follows that listing wherein he talks about not only the line troops understanding the object of their work. He says, actually it's easiest to maintain morale among the troops on the front line, which might sound counterintuitive to somebody who hasn't spent a lot of time in an army because you'd think, oh, those folks are closest to danger. How could it be that their morale is easiest to maintain? He says these frontline troops have the best morale because they're closest to the fight. And therefore they have most readily at hand an understanding of the purpose of their work. That's what matters. It's the support troops that you have to worry about who don't, every hour or every day encounter the purpose of their work because they're too far removed from the fight. They're in the rear doing essential but second order or third order function. [00:59:01] Speaker A: He goes out of his way to have those discussions with individual soldiers to try to instill in them that. That precisely that belief that what they're doing is. I believe he uses the analogy of, of a watch or a clock. [00:59:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:59:17] Speaker A: Where he says, you know, you've got the central cog. That's me, the commander. You've got all these other big cogs, that's the, you know, subordinate corps commanders or division commanders, and you've got all these tin cogs. One of these tiny little cogs is you. But guess what? You remove that cog and the whole watch ceases to work. It's a. It's a. It's a very simple but very brilliant analogy, I think. [00:59:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:59:36] Speaker A: And so that does give us a. A window into what. What I think by this stage of the book, that's if you've got nothing else, you understand what. What William Slim believes is essential to achieving victory on the battlefield. Morale, leadership, training. And then they also had the improvements in their logistics, intelligence and air power that set the stage for the victory that we know because of the name of the book is about to come. And we get into that in part three. [01:00:05] Speaker B: So what Slim wants to do first, for all sorts of reasons, is he wants to fight in early 1944, the Japanese in India. He wants to first defeat them in India BEFORE the 14th army pushes into Burma, not only to attrit Japanese combat power, but also to build the confidence, the confidence of his soldiers and the confidence of his generals. The psychological disadvantage that Slim assesses his men suffer in 1942-1943 can't be overstated. The speed and the completeness of the victory that the Japanese enjoy in 1942 establishes in the minds of the Allies an almost supernatural picture of Japanese fighting capability, particularly in the jungle. And Slim understands that if he's going to retake Burma, he has to dispel Once and for all the ideas that the Japanese enjoy, this inherent and almost magical ability to defeat Allied forces in Asia, he gets the chance to do that when the Japanese invade India. This invasion orients on two important sites along the Japanese Burma border stretching from southwest to northeast. Those are Imphal and Dimapur. We are not going to get into the nitty gritty of the defense of Imphal and Dimapour, but suffice to say this is an incredibly hard fight which results in Allied victory. The Allies succeed in defending Imphal and they don't fight as much in defense of Dimapour as they do in defense of a village that sits astride the lines of communication which link Dimapur and Imphal. And that village is called Kohi. The Battle of Kohima is one of the great dramatic battles of World War II. It is an improbable defense of a ridge and the village atop that ridge by Allied forces against an overwhelming Japanese onslaught. The garrison at Kohima has to consolidate under the pressure of these successive Japanese waves so much that it shrinks to barely the size of a single building before it is relieved by a Allied force and eventually the Japanese are thrown back. The heroism and the fruit of the reinvention that Slim has undertaken alongside his commanders over the preceding year all command enduring respect from students of. [01:02:36] Speaker A: I think it's also worth noting something some historians have referred to the battles of Imphal and Kohima together collectively as the, the, what do they call it? The Stalingrad of the East. Look, neither one of these cities is nearly the size that Stalingrad was at the time. But it does highlight, you know, when you talk about the, the garrison sort of shrinking down to a single building. Those are the same dynamics that we saw in major urban battles like Stalingrad. This was a fundamentally different battle than many of the others that were fought, even ones that were fought for cities, because this is the one place where there was fighting from building to building in man made built up areas. [01:03:12] Speaker B: Right? And the Japanese defeat is so humiliating and so controversial in the Japanese high command that the general officer in charge of the attacking Japanese 15th army is relieved. That's General Mutaguchi. That means that when Slim is devising his plan for the conquest of Burma in the end of 1944, he has to contend with a new Japanese general, that being General Kimura. And what Slim writes is that he made a mistake in planning the conquest of Burma. That is to say, he assumed that the new generalship was much like the old generalship of the Japanese force. He opposed he has a great deal of respect for Japanese fighters in certain regards. But Slim believes that one of their shortcomings is that the Japanese generalship during the Second World War is dogmatic and inflexible. So when he sketches out the way he wants to retake Burma, what he expects is that the Japanese will commit to a defense of Burma in the plain that lies between the Chinwin river in the west and the Irrawaddy river further east. This great more desert like environment. When he launches his 14th army across the Chinwin river, however, in December 1944, what he discovers is that Kimura, the new Japanese commander of the opposing force, is a little more dynamic. Kimura, rather than taking the bait and choosing to take a stand in the permissive terrain of the plain that lies between the Chinwin and the Irrawaddy river, retreats east and controlled fashion over the Irrawaddy river and decides to wait for the Allies on the far side, still able to protect Rangoon and the other critical terrain. [01:05:07] Speaker A: Do you remember the episode in the, in the book when he walks into the air headquarters and they're planning operations, and one of the operations they're planning is a bombing raid, I believe, against the headquarters of this, this Japanese commander. And he asked them not to do that because that Japanese commander is making all of these mistakes. He's become so predictable that he doesn't want them to replace him with a commander that will be more adaptable and will make strategically wise decisions like pulling back your forces so you don' a river at your back when you're going to fight this major battle. [01:05:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. That's one of these great humorous episodes that pockmark the book and make it so readable. Either way, Slim has to pivot in December 1944. So rather than fight a fight in the plane that lies between the Chinwin and the Irrawaddy rivers, he has to devise a new plan. And the plan that he devises is the one that ultimately wins the Burma campaign. And he does so on short notice. The staff were worked day and night for weeks to sketch out a plan whereby the 14th army conduct a massive feint, a whole bunch of elements conduct a major wet gap crossing over the Irrawaddy in the north, while a fourth corps moves secretly, to use this language. One major element peels off and goes south through very dense terrain, what's now called the Yaw Valley, what he calls the Ganga Valley, in order to obscure their approach towards a important logistical node that is the key to southern Burma, called Maktila, the wet gap crossing that is the faint across the Irrawaddy, is extremely difficult, and the movement through the Ganga Valley is similarly extremely difficult. But both aspects of these plans, that is to say the Wet Gap crossing and fourth Corps secret movement southbound towards Metila, illustrate things that Slim did successfully during the reconstitution of the 14th army in 1943 and early 1944, during the quote, unquote, into part of the defeat, into victory. And that is one, he got his men comfortable with the jungle. He dispelled the mythos that surrounded jungle warfare that convinced so many soldiers they could not fight in the jungle, that the jungle was somehow an enemy that was a partisan of the Japanese against the Allies. And he helped himself and thereby got God to help him. Them, to use the phrase that he says becomes the unofficial motto of the 14th Army. First, by iteratively patrolling, particularly at night, and building these ground lines of communication through the jungle, he prepared the 4th Corps of the 14th army for this great clandestine sweep down through the Gangwa Valley towards the city of Maktila. And then by helping himself, by getting the 14th army, rather than waiting for material assistance from afar to literally build its own landing vessels in the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, he prepares his formations materially for an extremely difficult wet gap crossing. And there's a description of the conversations that Slim has with his chief engineer, Bill Hastid, on my page 390, that conveys the sort of can do attitude that by 1944 pervaded the 14th army that makes all this possible. He's explaining to Hasta the necessity of the wet gap crossing and the logistical support that will need to cross the river once that wet gap crossing is complete. He says, you know, we're going to need X number of vessels. We're going need to move X number of tons per day. And Bill Hasted says with a grin, sir, for miracles like that, we need a month's notice at least. And Slim says, you're lucky I'm giving you two months so you can accomplish double the miracles that I'm asking you to. But that sort of approach whereby anything is regarded as surmountable with enough commitment and enough ingenuity enables these wet crap crossings to occur. What does that look like? In fact, they use elephants to drag thousands of teak logs out of the jungle to build landing craft. They dredge rivers, they rest from riverbeds. Japanese vessels that have sunk, they use dumb barges. They basically use anything that'll float and out of nothing, create a landing force. That's capable of a major wet gap crossing. [01:10:18] Speaker A: This is effectively, I mean, I think this is a really another important transition. If you look at the force that was defeated during 1942, it was one that was defeated by. It was defeated by the Japanese forces and the terrain. This is a force that has learned to use the terrain to its advantage, right? [01:10:37] Speaker B: Be it the major river systems that move north and south, up and down Burma or the jungle. So the faint succeeds. The Japanese mistake the 33rd Corps for the entirety of the 14th Army. They miss the 4th Corps approach southbound towards Miktila, and Slim's 14th army seizes Metila in March of 1945. They correctly assess that without this logistical node, the Japanese can't retain southern burma. And by the 2nd of May, they've captured Rangoon, thereby seeing through the successful termination of an extraordinary comeback from humiliating disorganized retreat in 1942 to complete conquest of key terrain against a numerically superior force in 1945. [01:11:26] Speaker A: And that is, you know, it sounds like kind of an abrupt way to finish the story, but it was sort of an abrupt end to the story. It was, you know, defeat. It was this transition. Then it was going in the offense and fighting, and then they won. [01:11:44] Speaker B: Right. And I think it's worth reflecting on the timeline. The defeat of the, the Allies in Burma in 1942 basically occurs from February to May of 1942, and then from May of 1942 to March of 1944 is what Slim calls the period wherein they forged the weapon. That's the. Into part of defeat, into victory. And then March of 1944 to May of 1945 is the victory. But a lot of that victory, in fact occurs from December of 1944 to May of 1945, a six month stretch. And I think that that is an important lesson in of itself. Like, you need only survey the timeline to arrive at the conclusion that the longest and most substantive portion, in certain ways of what Slim did was that reconstitution between defeat and victory. Victory wasn't a foregone conclusion. There was a great deal of heroism and luck and effort that went into the victory portion, but it was made possible by this intervening period. There are innumerable lessons, and we'll try to break out some of them in the closing here that one can draw from that reconstitution effort. But the timeline speaks for itself. One thing that you might be left wondering is, so what? Was there any geopolitical or strategic consequence to the victory in Burma? Or was it just an Opportunity for William Slim to teach us some things about generalship and combat power generation. And I think that the short answer is of course it was important. Our purposes are here to mark those lessons that we've talked about. Humility, empathy, the attention paid to morale, the can do attitude, the ability to overcome material disadvantages. There are some scholars who have said that the fight for Burma was really a fight for British Empire. This is particularly prevalent in Frank McClind's history of the Burma campaign entitled the Burma Campaign disaster into Triumph 1942-1945. McClind's angle is basically that the fight for Burma all but was for naught because the British really fought it in order to preserve their empire. And that empire disassembled within a half decade of the end of the campaign. What a shame or what a tragedy that so much was wasted. Lewis Allen, who wrote Burma The Longest War, 1941-1945, has an alternate account that I think is worth quoting just because I found it a rather poignant and B a rather stimulating counterfactual to consider. I'll pick up in part of his preface that is considering the consequences of the Burma campaign. He says, the stone raised in memory of the dead at Kohima. Remember that's one of the great defenses early on in 1944 against the Japanese invasion into India. The stone raised in memory of the dead at Kohima says with brief poignancy, quote, when you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave our today. This, by the way, is one of the most famous epitaphs in the British military. But for whose tomorrow were those lives given? Lewis Allen, the historian, is now asking for an empire on the verge of voluntary dissolution, knowing it could not hold on much longer to its rich dominions by a military force which was both too poor and too self doubting to exercise. Yet it is too facile to suggest they died for nothing. What if the dreams of Lt. Gen. Mutaguchi, one of Japan's most ambitious generals, had been realized? If there had been no barrier to his invasion of India, he saw the possibility of wresting India from the British, thereby completing the collapse of British power in the east, entailing perhaps withdrawal from the war. Combined with the link up with triumphant German forces through the Caucasus and Persia, the Japanese might have achieved not a defeat of the United States, but an isolation from her allies that might in the end have compelled a separate peace, a compromise with the worst elements in recent German and Japanese history that might have resulted in a world of authoritarian Militarized darkness. No doubt all this seems fanciful when we look at our present reality, but that is precisely because the battle was won in the way that it was. And I find that somewhat compelling, if difficult to prove. I don't know what you think, John. [01:16:20] Speaker A: I think you could make a compelling case for either argument. But suffice it to say that it is not a foregone conclusion that Alan isn't correct, that that counterfactual could not have taken place. And we started this, you know, the episode in, in the, in the intro, asking the question, why did this, why did, why did Burma matter? I think that's as much a reason as any of what could have been had the Allies not won, had The British not one in. In Burma in 1945. [01:16:51] Speaker B: Right. And either way, there are a lot of great lessons. Which brings us to the margin notes portion of this episode as we wrap up. I thought there'd be one margin note that I'd start with, John, this being this section for new listeners at the end where we intend to just make mention of some less than essential but nonetheless interesting takeaways. It's on my page 532. In his afterthought section at the very end of the book, Slim considers what his experience in Burma suggests about the future of warfare. Mind you, he's writing in 1957. He says war in the future may vary in scope from unlimited nuclear war to restricted tactical employment of nuclear weapons, or even to the small war of the traditional pattern. He says either way, modern war, and now I'm quoting, with its destruction of bases, disruption of communications and disorganization of control will, if they, meaning armies, are to operate at all, compel armies to disperse, disperse fighting, whether the dispersal is caused by the terrain, the lack of supplies, or by the weapons of the enemy, who have two main requirements, skilled and determined junior officers and self reliant, physically hard, well disciplined troops. My impression of the reporting from the ongoing war in Ukraine suggests that Slim, for his emphasis on dispersal, for his emphasis on physical hardness and for his emphasis on low level initiative, was quite prescient. And I think it's like a pretty remarkable passage, particularly useful for the audience that we have at West Point, which thinks hard about what makes a good junior officer in modern war, certainly at the Modern War Institute. What else struck you that you wanted to mention? [01:18:42] Speaker A: Well, I think that that's a perfect example of the fact that just as there is the immutable nature of war and within it the changing character of warfare, there are these Sort of eternal truths about war. And, you know, Slim highlights many of them. Issues like morale, for instance. You know, when I, when I started reading this book, I had read it years and years ago, but I don't think I had read it closely enough to appreciate it. As I was rereading it in advance of this episode, I found myself thinking, you know, what are the lessons from a war 80 plus years ago now from, from a series of campaigns fought in Burma 80 years ago now for modern war, even as we have shifted our strategic attention back to this part of the world, the Indo Pacific region, There are certainly. Would a war fought in this over the same terrain today look the same? No, it wouldn't look the same. But does that mean that there are not lessons to be had? No, certainly not. One of them is, you know, why do we call this margin notes? Because this is when we're reading the book. The things that you underline and you asterisk and you make little notes in the, in the margins of the book while you're reading, but don't necessarily make into the discussion that we're planning on having over the course of the three parts of each episode. You mentioned comrade. We've talked about comrade. Command relationships. There were some absolutely bonkers command relationships at play at various times during this. One of them was during the first Archon campaign where Slim was sent forward as the core commander and asked the army commander, does that mean that I have control of the forces there? And he said, yes, you have operational control, but you do not have administrative control, which means you can direct them where to go, but you can't request the supplies that they will need in order to do what they need to do when they go there. It's, it's mind blowing that you would think that in, in a major war you would have an. A situation like this, but you did even more so. Look who had one name that's come up throughout this discussion that we haven't really talked about. We could, we won't. Is Joe Stillwell the American commander in the region who had the Chinese forces fighting underneath him. He was the senior American general officer in, in the area at the time in, in Southeast Asia at the time. So Stillwell refuses to, to place himself under the command of any non American general officer. He says he hasn't been authorized to do so by the War Department. He does make an exception to that. He says he will fight under Slim. [01:21:16] Speaker B: Them. [01:21:17] Speaker A: We never really understand why he's going to do that. But Slim then is an army commander who's got Stillwell's core underneath him and another core underneath him, the 15th Corps that he had previously commanded. However, he's responsible for them in very Byzantine ways. He says it created an even more illogical situation by it. I took command of all land operations on the Burma front, but I was responsible to my army group commander for only the 14th army position of the force for still was formation. I was theoretically responsible only to the supreme commander. It is bonkers that you would have any sort of line in Blockchart, you know, where this would make sense on paper. And you made a really good comment when I mentioned this, when we were talking before recording this about, you know, people in the peacetime army thinking, seeing, you know, ridiculousness around them in command relationships or whatever, what have you, and say this would never happen if we were. If we were at war, it did. [01:22:13] Speaker B: Right. And yeah, that's one of the thoughts to which I return over the course of the book. You just laid out the at times insane comrade, right? Command relationships governing the 14th army and the supporting units and the higher headquarters all throughout the Burma campaign. Also, the low priority for material support, the fickle nature of the joint fight, the multinational partners own countervailing incentives and concerns, all of these things would have made Slim's life very difficult. And rather than gripe about them, he makes the most of them and sees through his campaign to victory. If you in the peacetime army, or if I, or if we feel as though we are materially disadvantaged, Slim probably had it worse. If you feel as though comrade puts you to disadvantage, Slim probably had it worse. If you feel as though you're dealing with a difficult partner, Slim probably had it worse. If you feel as though you're dealing with difficult terrain, Slim probably had it worse. If you're feeling as though you are dealing with, you know, insurmountable or tactically superior enemy, slim in the 14th army probably had it worse. Now, he had a lot going for him. He had great commanders, and he's very deliberate about pointing that out. But I just take heart generally from his narrative, that is to say, I conclude that if the 14th army could achieve victory in Burma, then probably the operational problem which I'm confronting as a military professional can be solved. That's not to make a saint or a perfect commander out of Slim. He was imperfect, deeply so, and he points out many ways in which he was. But it is to say that his example is inspiring and instructive. There are a whole bunch of topics that we failed to talk about in the discussion of this book that any student of the Burma campaign might point out as important. We didn't really talk about the relationship that Slim has with Chiang Kai Shek and Stilwell has with Chiang Kai Shek. We don't talk about the fact that at the last moment, right when they most needed combat power, the Chinese nationalists pull combat power away from the offensive in Burma. We don't really talk about the shortage of landing craft related to the demands for landing craft at D Day. We don't talk about other theaters. We don't talk about the specifics of the Kohima defense or the special operations that occur all throughout. We don't talk about the Lido Road. We don't talk about flying over the hump. These are all important aspects of a very, very, very rich episode. But our hope is here we've just scratched the surface of what, what both Slim's example and of course the book itself. Defeat into Victory can teach us about modern war today. Which brings us probably to the very end, our section on Saved Rounds. These are the one or two things that we think were worth talking about that we won't get to. The fun facts, the little details, the [01:25:22] Speaker A: rabbit hole, things that came up. Things that came up while we were researching, preparing for this episode, but maybe aren't relevant to the episode but are worth mentioning. [01:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And one is that I think it's fascinating. The book is really well written. Not all generals can write. Slim clearly can. That becomes less surprising if you know that throughout the entirety of the interwar period between World War I and World War II, in order to earn a supplemental income because he couldn't make do with his family on the. The army income he had, William Slim wrote under a pen name, short stories and novels. That pen name was Anthony Mills for various periodicals and publishing houses at the time. The idea that you could at once be one of the great operational minds of your century and also be a secret novelist I think is amusing and for many reasons, not the least of them being that it just contradicts what in our mind is the archetypical or prototypical fighting general, you know, the. The patent in our imagination. So I haven't yet read anything by, quote, unquote, Anthony Mills. But I am really eager to find a William Slim short story and read it. [01:26:41] Speaker A: There's a collection of them that were. That were published posthumously under the title A Close Shave. [01:26:46] Speaker B: Oh, I should. I should go find that. [01:26:48] Speaker A: That. So my saved round. Wim Slim earned a temporary commission after spending some time in. In an officer training program. Affiliated with the University of Birmingham, a university that he did not attend because his family only had money to send one child to university and his older brother either had attended or was attending that university. Earned his temporary commission. Fought in World War I, including at the Battle of Gallipoli, where he was severely wounded. Wounded in the chest during a bayonet charge. [01:27:16] Speaker B: Wounded in the chest during a bayonet charge at Gallipoli. [01:27:21] Speaker A: Incredible. Evacuated. Medically evacuated. Returned to service and earned a regular commission and rose through the ranks based, as we said at the outset, on his merit alone. [01:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we didn't have the time to explore the innovations in medical care that William Slim oversees in the Burma theater. But that those innovations whereby he makes it a lot more comfortable for the wounded to get back to higher care via air evacuation makes a lot more sense when you realize that he suffered an egregious wound at Gallipoli. He probably was able to empathize with those who had to be evacuated over land under miserable conditions. And that's fascinating. Also goes to show another level to the depth of his resilience. It's not just that he overcame defeat in Perma, it's that he overcame a bayonet wound in the chest. [01:28:15] Speaker A: Severe chest. Yeah, exactly. Which brings us to our very final very or our final very short segment bonus reads where we share one other thing that we've read recently. May or may not be related to the book that we've covered in this episode, but just something that we read and enjoyed and wanted to share. Theo, what's your bonus read this week? This episode? [01:28:36] Speaker B: Oh, I actually have had a great time listening to Rick Atkinson's Revolution trilogy, at least the first book of it. The British are coming. We're approaching the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn here in August. And these early moments of the revolution, not totally unlike William Sloan's experience, were dire, more dire than I think popular memory understands. You know, And I have been thinking a lot about what it must have taken for George Washington to hold the revolutionary army together. There's probably some think piece that nobody needs to be written that one could write about the analog between Slim and Washington. I suppose one big difference is that Slim, more so inherited the defeat while Washington oversaw it in Brooklyn. But. But they're both remarkably resilient leaders. What about you, John? [01:29:35] Speaker A: So mine has nothing to do with. With defeat into victory. The only connection that it has is that it, it covers a similar period that is World War II, but in a very different place and a very different theme. The book is called Dynamo Triumph and Tragedy in Nazi Occupied Kyiv. It's relevant, obviously, for a number of reasons. Kyiv is in the news, as it has been over the past number of years, as a capital of a city under or capital of a country under siege by Russian forces. But it tells the story of a soccer team, a football team called Dinamo Kiev, and its role during this occupation in rallying support and keeping the city sort of vibrant and alive, or as vibrant and alive as it could be under a very, very harsh occupation by the Nazis. I picked it out because it fuses two of my interests. One is military history and the other is soccer, especially European soccer. So the book is called Dynamo. It's by Andy Dugan. Most importantly, if you take nothing away from this is I bought it at a used bookstore in Washington D.C. on Dupont Circle called Second Story Books. So this is my call to frequent used bookstores because they are a fantastic source of books that otherwise you would never come across. And reading those books that are unexpected and that don't appear on professional military reading lists or aren't reviewed frequently, that are otherwise obscure and forgotten, I think is important. So go visit your local used bookstore and find something you've never heard of and read it. Awesome. With that, we will end Episode two of the MWI Book Club. We're excited. We've got the next few books. We've got the next few books selected. If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you subscribe and follow MWI on social media because we'll be putting out announcements about the books that we will be covering in the next three to four episodes so listeners that are so inclined can read the book ahead of time and really follow the discussion in kind of a different way. Along with us and those next two [01:31:40] Speaker B: books are Joe Haldeman's science fiction masterpiece the Forever War. And then we're going to go back in time to the middle of the 19th century and read Leo Tolstoy's under discussed novel of counterinsurgency, basically in the Caucasus, Haji Marat. [01:32:03] Speaker A: I'm really excited about that one. Thanks to you. We'll talk to you next time. [01:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to the MWI Book Club. [01:32:17] Speaker A: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss future episodes. [01:32:22] Speaker B: And please take just a second and leave a rating or review which really helps new listeners to find us. [01:32:28] Speaker A: And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are our own views and don't reflect those of west point, the army or any other agency of the US Government. [01:32:37] Speaker B: Thanks again.